Home Forums Reloading Bullet Casting No More Smelting With Propane For Me......

making a rocket wood stove ?

The initial plan is to use homemade charcoal instead of wood. I'll experiment with commercial charcoal as well, and also coal. I believe I can buy that a little cheaper than propane, but I'm hoping the homemade charcoal will work. I'll actually make the charcoal with this contraption. If that works it's all free zero cost.

I'm not above adding a waste oil drip and forced air if need be, but yeah, a heavy duty rocket style stove with controlled air and fuel supply to regulate temps. This will be for smelting and cleaning 75 to 100 pounds of raw stuff at a time. I use electric pots for casting.

good deal, going to make me one when I can snag some 6" sch.40 SS pipe from work. I live on salt water carbon steel/salt water/high heat don't last here

I thought we were talking about night fishing Lake Michigan with nets

Beer batter dipped deep fried smelts is pretty dang good eats.......

Smelting: the act of refining metal from ore. Y'all are more ambitious than me!

Kidding, I know it's a term used by reclaimers of scrap lead, but I do wonder how it came about. Probably the same way "squib" came to mean a bullet stuck in a barrel after originating as a term for low velocity cast bullet target load....

I have built several of the heaters. I wish you luck. Forced air is your friend. And insulate the riser. It will keep heat going up instead of radiating it out.

Tacked things up and did an R&D test burn yesterday, despite not being totally sealed up where it's supposed to be. Figured a few things out. Canceled some concerns and discovered some others. Did manage to get it up to 800° at the top of the chimney and melted a large sinker, but it wasn't with commercial charcoal, and it wasn't without forced air. Pine chop saw scraps got it way hotter than the charcoal, but still needed a leaf blower (out of frame in the pic) to put a good wind in the air box. So probably an Amazon variable speed forge blower to order up.

Taking it back apart today and making my fire grate holes larger to start, and make the chimney stack a little shorter. I actually want to get it to go too hot, so I can throttle it back with air control to the temps I need and have more control over it. Right now, as is, it's struggling to even get up there. 75 or 80 lbs of lead in a dutch oven takes a good bit of heat.

Processing zinc will be part of its use also so I need it to go hotter than for lead alloys anyway.

Look up secondary air source. It helps sometimes.

There's a couple few variable speed forge fans with metal housings listed on Amazon for not a lot of money. They look stupid easy to plenum into the front of my air box. Kinda figured I'd have to go that route anyway to get temps up high enough with this large size "tubing".

Lotsa ways to force air into this thing but that would be the simplest. Run it off house power, generator, solar charged battery feeding a large inverter I have, etc. If I really want to cheap out I'll just go 18th century high tech.

Anybody saying a rocket stove is too hot for this are just supposing and ain't ever tried one. Maybe hot enough to burn eggs, but melting lead nope.

But, this thing being large volume doesn't jet like a 3 or 4 inch tube would, it's pretty much just a funky woodstove, so there's that.

damm that sucks , only thing I know that might bump up btu,s is pure oxygen piped in

It's a cute little winter time project that might just work as intended.

If it doesn't, meh, no big deal......

Cut the heat riser 10 inches shorter and drilled 9 more 11/16" holes in the 1/2" thick ash grate. So almost doubling the holes from 12 to 21. That should add quite a bit more air flow to the fire.

Welded in the ash grate and found what I'm going to use for "legs" to stabilize the base.

My son drug out some 5/32 7018 rods from his work gang box and that's what I'll use tomorrow to weld up the seams in the halves of the 6" channel iron.

Made a plan to add a fire tending door right beside the fire box instead of poking at it with a long stick from up in the fuel hopper.

Pretty sure a forge blower from Amazon will fix the BTU issue......

Forget the rocket stove idea, you need to build a blacksmith’s firepot to burn that charcoal to get the most efficiency out of it. DF in the shop on YouTube has very good videos on designing and constructing firepots.
I melt lead over my forge all the time and its is far faster than any other method.

How portable is your forge?

And can you fire it up for lead in bad weather, ie rain?

Roofed?

Combining molten lead and water can be quite exciting. Tinsel, skin graft's and Darwin Awards come to mind.

Yup, The Tinsel Fairy is an unforgiving little bitch, which is exactly why I like at least a roof over my head and don't fook around with it when the wind is blowing forty hells during a rain.

My carport is a great place for smelting and casting lead, but I don't need a permanent blacksmithing forge out there......

Little more headway made......